Reno Reporter

A second-year doctoral student at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Integrative Neuroscience Graduate Program is examining questions related to proprioception.

According to a news release shared by the university, Amy Morris' interest in proprioception developed during an internship at the University of Delaware where she studied the impact amputation has on an amputees' brains changes after the procedure.

“During one of the lectures at the internship, the Pinocchio illusion was really off-handedly commented on but just having a brief intro on the illusion I was hooked,” Morris said in the release.

The Pinocchio illusion involves deceiving the brain into believing that one’s nose or arm is growing.

Morris published a study in The Ohio Psychologist that men fall under the illusion twice as much as women. Since the study examined the illusion in young adults, Morris now wants to study the illusion among older adults.

According to Morris: “Following that internship, I took a course at my undergrad university where I designed and ran my own experiment, and I structured that experiment around the illusion.”

Her current research in the lab of Associate Professor Fang Jiang compares proprioception in older adults and younger adults and whether lesser proprioception in older adults would make them more prone to the Pinocchio illusion.

In order to measure proprioception, a participant's arm is moved to a determined position with the participant told to move the arm and then move it back with proprioception determined how close the participant came to the original position.